Data

The open data project aiming at building a CC0Wikidata-centered database on resources, to support the needs of the web app, while being enriched by its users, and more broadly speaking, to concretize our mission: mapping resources with libre software and open knowledge, starting with books.

This article aims to document this second aspect, by:

making the context of open data production in Inventaire understandible by people who might be more interested in the structured data produced by the application than by its book sharing aspect

helping data re-use, especially, but not only, by importing data produced in Inventaire back to Wikidata

Data sources

Wikidata

Wikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement, and to anyone in the world.

Internal database

As Wikidata doesn't aim to gather data on all books and their editions, but only those that match certain notability criteria, we can't only rely on it, thus the introduction of a internal database, made of users contributions, linked to Wikidata entities. See Data contribution guidelines.

Those data will are published under a CC0 license, so that the Wikidata community can import the entities that are relevant to Wikidata following their criteria.

Web data seeds

Basic Facts on books editions extracted from the wide web, proceessed, and enriched to bootstrap the data set of an edition missing to the database. This is made in an attempt to ease and somewhat automatize what a user encountering missing data would have to do manually: go on the web, searching basic facts like a title, the author's name, a book cover. That's a temporary solution, waiting to be replaced by more reliable data sources, like raw libraries and publishers open data.

Data structure

The term entity gathers all the concepts of works (books, comics, manga, etc.), editions of those works, their authors and series. Largely following Wikidata data model, those entities are linked together by properties.

Differences between Wikidata and Inventaire terminologies

In the Wikidata terminology, entities gather both concepts of items (all the things with a Q-id) and properties (all things with a P-id)

In Inventaire terminology, the equivalent of Wikidata items are called entities (example), the term items being used to refer to what users inventories are made of (example), each item being an instance of an entity.

Examples of relations between entities

I, Robot, the book edition uniquely identified by its ISBN: 978-0-00-753227-8 → is an edition of (property P629 in Wikidata) → the work I, Robot, uniquely identified in Wikidata as Q393018

Usually an edition is the edition of a unique work. In special cases, an edition can be the edition of several works (for instance, an edition that would gather the Harry Potter volumes 1 and 2): we call those composite or multi-work editions.

The user inventory is made of items, each item being an instance of an edition.

Data editor

To edit Inventaire entities, you first need to create an Inventaire account. In addition, to edit Wikidata entities from the Inventaire entity editor, you will be invited to connect your Wikidata account. But you can also simply click the "Edit on Wikidata" button.

The editor is largely inspired by Wikidata own editor so that the Wikidata community feels at home ;) But at the same time, it is designed to make the contribution of anyone - aware of Wikidata or not - easy and welcome. Inputs values are thus more constrained than in Wikidata, a few examples:

you won't be able to state that a book as a montaign for author

following the WikiProject Books recommandations to separate works and their editions (the FRBR-ish way), you won't be allowed to set an ISBN on a work

additionnaly, you won't be allowed to set claims that belong to the work level on the edition, as we assume that editions inherit those from the works they are associated with, and that it would be unnecessary duplications